Handi Quilter Sweet Sixteen Day 9 - pattern practice

I know this is lame, but I find stippling really hard. I see patterns everywhere. I have an OCD personality. If I can't impose order on things I start to twitch. I saw an advertisment for a FMQ class which said that the participants must at least be able to stipple and my reaction was: why are they starting with the hardest part first? I worry that my randomness is insufficiently random!

I guess it comes down to practice again, but I also find it helpful to have a motif to work around, rather than a big empty space to fill. These cute little frogs pop a little more with stippling in the background. I'm working white on white so mistakes won't be a show stopper while I practice. I'm hoping it's not like cracks in the pavement; if I cross a line, no bears will get me! Hopefully the quilt police won't find me either! Click to enlarge. A great thing about the Sweet Sixteen is that it is so forgiving of stops and starts. With the Bernina, despite my best efforts, I would sometimes get a jag as I took off again after a stop. The Sweet Sixteen takes off smoothly and it is almost impossible to see where the stop was.

I do need to be careful of hovering in one place though. I've had a couple of nasty thread lumps build up because I am dithering about where to go next. Instead, I need to stop with the needle down and contemplate my options. The other thing I've  found is that if I make a stitch with no fabric in place the thread creates a knot in the bobbin area with the Sweet Sixteen. The Bernina just sighs deeply and brings the thread up again, in the hopes that I won't be a twit the second time around!

What does a frog need in the surrounding stripes? Some tasty snacks! I was going to do flies, but then I thought that might be kind of gross, so instead I have a flittery butterfly kind of thing. It was very forgiving to sew. The echoed wing meant that if I made the first wing too small, I echoed around the outside, and if I got it the right size then I echoed around the inside. 

Did I mention I love hand-dyes? The color variation makes for really interesting fabric.